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<div class=“QuoteAuthor”><a href="/profile/15874/Slamtastic">Slamtastic</a> said:</div>
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<div class=“QuoteAuthor”><a href="/profile/20554/NickRocks">NickRocks</a> said:</div>
<div class=“QuoteText”>If a fighting game doesn’t have a higher execution to practice, then…what the hell is there to do</div>
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React to and predict an actual human intellect.<br></div>
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that’s cute and all, but honestly the only people I ever see praising less complexity and execution and more “mindgames” are scrubs who like to memorize frame data but suck at actually playing the game.<div><br></div><div>You learn combos, then you learn how to use them in matches and the best times. That’s how it goes. If you remove the need to practice combos then the fun of fighting games is gone</div>
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<div class=“QuoteAuthor”><a href="/profile/20554/NickRocks">NickRocks</a> said:</div>
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<div class=“QuoteAuthor”><a href="/profile/15874/Slamtastic">Slamtastic</a> said:</div>
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<div class=“QuoteAuthor”><a href="/profile/20554/NickRocks">NickRocks</a> said:</div>
<div class=“QuoteText”>If a fighting game doesn’t have a higher execution to practice, then…what the hell is there to do</div>
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React to and predict an actual human intellect.<br></div>
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that’s cute and all, but honestly the only people I ever see praising less complexity and execution and more “mindgames” are scrubs who like to memorize frame data but suck at actually playing the game.<div><br></div><div>You learn combos, then you learn how to use them in matches and the best times. That’s how it goes. If you remove the need to practice combos then the fun of fighting games is gone</div></div>
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If that were the case, then KI would be the greatest fighting game of all time.<div><br></div><div>Combos only support the neutral game. The best players of all time, are the ones who can win in the neutral game even before they hit a combo.</div>
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<div class=“QuoteAuthor”><a href="/profile/4806/tataki">tataki</a> said:</div>
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<div class=“QuoteAuthor”><a href="/profile/20554/NickRocks">NickRocks</a> said:</div>
<div class=“QuoteText”>If a fighting game doesn’t have a higher execution to practice, then…what the hell is there to do</div>
</blockquote>So reaction, spacing, knowledge, prediction, assessing situations, functioning under pressure etc. are skills that don’t really exist and as soon as you can do special moves with Ryu in SF2 you reach Shooting D’s level? I think you are mixing fighting game with rhythm games…<br></div>
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wow that’s a reach.<div><br></div><div>Sentinel in MvC2 is basically the example I am going for. He is a character that you can practice and get better with, and still has all those "metagame’ things people love to talk about. Put the lk out at the wrong time or with not enough space and get punished.</div>
<font face=“Arial, Verdana” size=“2” style=“font-family: Arial, Verdana; font-size: 10pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal;”><span style=“line-height: normal;”>A good game should have easy stuff available as a precursor to the hard stuff, but not invalidating the use of the hard stuff.</span></font><div style=“font-family: Arial, Verdana; font-size: 10pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal;”><br></div><div style=“font-family: Arial, Verdana; font-size: 10pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal;”>A character that comes to mind as a good example of this is Millia from GG. She’s a character that’s entirely about getting a knockdown and then doing oki with a high/low mixup, preferably in the corner. If you want to play her to her fullest potential, you’ll need to learn several oki setups, different combos for each setup and different combos for many different characters. However, you can also just opt for a ground gatling into knockdown and just go for a simple 6K or 2K mixup instead. The essence of her mixup is still there, it’s just not fully established at the easy level at either the setup or rewards level, but you’re still dealing with the essence of the character.</div><div style=“font-family: Arial, Verdana; font-size: 10pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal;”><br></div><div><font face=“Arial, Verdana” size=“2”><font size=“2”><span style=“line-height: normal;”>For combos specifically, I think there are two methods to do it. You can have every character have a default easy combo while letting the hard combo stuff develop naturally or intentionally (magic series vs. rom), or you could have an entire character who’s premise is ease of use alongside characters that are much more technical to play (F-Ries v. C or H-Kohaku). It’s just fairly difficult to create a game using the latter model where the easy to use characters are truly easy and don’t feel like they’re dumbing down the entire game if they’re good or the easy characters are completely </span></font><span style=“line-height: normal;”>invalidated </span><font size=“2”><span style=“line-height: normal;”>at a competitive level because they’re easy.</span></font></font></div>
I think an important aspect is that when you lose to a better player (or a worse one I suppose) you should be able to tell why you lost and what you can do about it. You should be able to see if his spacing was better, if you missed blocking an overhead, if you got baited. 50/50s are hard, but at least you can usually see what the deal is. But stuff like “he jumped directly on top of my head and I couldn’t tell which way to block and I looked it up online and it’s unblockable” is not endearing to anyone.<br><br>And while everyone harps on come-back mechanics “go-ahead” mechanics are frustrating to new players as well. I’m looking at you Marvel and your “well I got touch-of-deathed but at least if I manage to block 5 cross-ups when my next character comes in I’ll be back to neutral.”<br><br>
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<div class=“SpoilerTitle”>Spoiler: And BTW, every genre talks about this</div>
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<br><font size=“1”>(I hope that spoiler works…)</font><br>
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<div class=“QuoteAuthor”><a href="/profile/68103/CyclopsPawnch">CyclopsPawnch</a> said:</div>
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<div class=“QuoteAuthor”><a href="/profile/57681/IglooBob">IglooBob</a> said:</div>
<div class=“QuoteText”>these all seem like pretty abstract things. does Marvel 2 have a higher skill ceiling than ST? how would you be able to tell if it did?<div><br></div><div>I like to think about games in terms of risk/reward and what kinds of behaviors are rewarded. I don’t really like how situations play out in SF4 for instance. but I doubt that has much to do with a skill ceiling or whatever.</div></div>
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I suppose top level play and/or TAS videos can show how fast and execution heavy a game can get, depending on what you mean by “skill cap”.</span></font><blockquote class=“Quote” style=“font-family: Arial, Verdana; font-size: 10pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal;”>
<div class=“QuoteAuthor”><a href="/profile/4119/rogueyoshi">rogueyoshi</a> said:</div>
<div class=“QuoteText”>this might be controversial, but one could say mvc2 (or any other game that lets a player do something like this) technically has a lower skillcap than a lot of games if you are able to convert a single clean hit into inf into guardbreak consistently. thats ignoring both the execution and difficulty it takes to land that clean hit though.</div>
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<font face=“Arial, Verdana” size=“2”><span style=“line-height: normal;”>You spin out of infinites in MvC2, but even if you didn’t if it’s so hard to pull off that people never do it doesn’t mean that the skill cap is high?<br>And lol that’s my quote in your sig from some SRK article forever ago, how long have you had that there?</span></font></div>
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i’m talking stuff like iron man / war machine 300%. a whole team is done with one touch in that scenario
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<div class=“QuoteAuthor”><a href="/profile/68103/CyclopsPawnch">CyclopsPawnch</a> said:</div>
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<div class=“QuoteAuthor”><a href="/profile/57681/IglooBob">IglooBob</a> said:</div>
<div class=“QuoteText”>these all seem like pretty abstract things. does Marvel 2 have a higher skill ceiling than ST? how would you be able to tell if it did?<div><br></div><div>I like to think about games in terms of risk/reward and what kinds of behaviors are rewarded. I don’t really like how situations play out in SF4 for instance. but I doubt that has much to do with a skill ceiling or whatever.</div></div>
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I suppose top level play and/or TAS videos can show how fast and execution heavy a game can get, depending on what you mean by “skill cap”.</span></font><blockquote class=“Quote” style=“font-family: Arial, Verdana; font-size: 10pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal;”>
<div class=“QuoteAuthor”><a href="/profile/4119/rogueyoshi">rogueyoshi</a> said:</div>
<div class=“QuoteText”>this might be controversial, but one could say mvc2 (or any other game that lets a player do something like this) technically has a lower skillcap than a lot of games if you are able to convert a single clean hit into inf into guardbreak consistently. thats ignoring both the execution and difficulty it takes to land that clean hit though.</div>
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<font face=“Arial, Verdana” size=“2”><span style=“line-height: normal;”>You spin out of infinites in MvC2, but even if you didn’t if it’s so hard to pull off that people never do it doesn’t mean that the skill cap is high?<br>And lol that’s my quote in your sig from some SRK article forever ago, how long have you had that there?</span></font></div>
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i’m talking stuff like iron man / war machine 300%. a whole team is done with one touch in that scenario
<a href="/profile/23130/Icy%20Black%20Deep">Icy Black Deep</a> said:<blockquote class=“Quote”>
<div class=“QuoteText”>“go-ahead” mechanics are frustrating to new players as well. I’m looking at you Marvel and your “well I got touch-of-deathed but at least if I manage to block 5 cross-ups when my next character comes in I’ll be back to neutral.”<br><br></div>
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Everything that separates the better from the worse is frustrating for new players, but in many cases it’s good for the game. Dangerous oki (that’s what incoming character setups in marvel are equivalent of) puts more emphasis on not making that stupid mistake you just did at the neutral game earlier. It turns every moment in the match into a more important one. Combine it with a deep, nuanced neutral game and you get very good games, but combine it with a simplistic neutral game and you make the matches feel “stupid” and “random”. So the question amounts to how much do you like MVC3’s neutral game?<br>
Cue all the 09’ers and later to chime in on this topic like they’re some kind of authority when they’ve never actually played anything beyond SF4 and MvC3.<div><br></div><div>Streamlining the games the way Capcom has since SF4 is a TERRIBLE approach if your aim is to make a competitively sound game. Placating the lazy is completely at odds with making a good game.</div>
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<div class=“QuoteAuthor”><a href="/profile/9887/d3v">d3v</a> said:</div>
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<div class=“QuoteAuthor”><a href="/profile/20554/NickRocks">NickRocks</a> said:</div>
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<div class=“QuoteAuthor”><a href="/profile/15874/Slamtastic">Slamtastic</a> said:</div>
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<div class=“QuoteAuthor”><a href="/profile/20554/NickRocks">NickRocks</a> said:</div>
<div class=“QuoteText”>If a fighting game doesn’t have a higher execution to practice, then…what the hell is there to do</div>
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React to and predict an actual human intellect.<br></div>
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that’s cute and all, but honestly the only people I ever see praising less complexity and execution and more “mindgames” are scrubs who like to memorize frame data but suck at actually playing the game.<div><br></div><div>You learn combos, then you learn how to use them in matches and the best times. That’s how it goes. If you remove the need to practice combos then the fun of fighting games is gone</div></div>
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If that were the case, then KI would be the greatest fighting game of all time.<div><br></div><div>Combos only support the neutral game. The best players of all time, are the ones who can win in the neutral game even before they hit a combo.</div></div>
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of course…but I like challenging combos and I dont think they should be removed
Character selection is a pretty great tool for that. You can make folks that need a lot of execution to succeed, others that need way less and just require the mindgame stuff other people are interested in. Contrast, say, Gen and Ryu in AE or whatever. Similar stuff in other games. I can play a complicated combo deck in Magic while the opponent plays something much simpler. Not a problem, we both have fun (as long as the matchup is reasonably balanced anyway). I don’t need to make others play complicated combo decks, others don’t need to make me stop playing them, which is what is advocated too often IMHO.<br><br>As far as video games go, I don’t know what it is, but Smash has IMHO found that elusive something. Easy to play, yes, but for some reason low level Smash doesn’t feel anywhere near as tedious and lacking as, say, AE. It’s fun and feels complete instead of gimped from the get go, and has a high skill ceiling. Seems ideal to me, Brawl’s campiness and tripping aside anyway.<br>
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<div class=“QuoteAuthor”><a href="/profile/20554/NickRocks">NickRocks</a> said:</div>
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<div class=“QuoteAuthor”><a href="/profile/9887/d3v">d3v</a> said:</div>
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<div class=“QuoteAuthor”><a href="/profile/20554/NickRocks">NickRocks</a> said:</div>
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<div class=“QuoteAuthor”><a href="/profile/15874/Slamtastic">Slamtastic</a> said:</div>
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<div class=“QuoteAuthor”><a href="/profile/20554/NickRocks">NickRocks</a> said:</div>
<div class=“QuoteText”>If a fighting game doesn’t have a higher execution to practice, then…what the hell is there to do</div>
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React to and predict an actual human intellect.<br></div>
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that’s cute and all, but honestly the only people I ever see praising less complexity and execution and more “mindgames” are scrubs who like to memorize frame data but suck at actually playing the game.<div><br></div><div>You learn combos, then you learn how to use them in matches and the best times. That’s how it goes. If you remove the need to practice combos then the fun of fighting games is gone</div></div>
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If that were the case, then KI would be the greatest fighting game of all time.<div><br></div><div>Combos only support the neutral game. The best players of all time, are the ones who can win in the neutral game even before they hit a combo.</div></div>
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of course…but I like challenging combos and I dont think they should be removed </div>
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The problem is when they begin to dominate the meta-game. Sure you can say that they support the neutral game by providing a “threat” to not get hit, but at that point it starts to feel more like an artificial barrier to access the game at its most competitive.
This question or variations thereof comes up at least once every 3 months or so.<br><br>Even when disregarding players’ subjective opinions, it’s not something that can be answered in a bubble. It is quite a complex topic that much smarter people having given lots of thought to over many years. And not just people in the FG industry.<br><br>For example, in danmaku SHMUPS, it’s almost expected from developers to include an auto-fire mode in their games. Why? In 90% of cases, “skill” in shmupping does not revolved around how well you can press buttons.<br>They’ve made bullets easier to see, not harder. Differentiating between background sprites and bullets can be challenging (I’m looking at you, Battle Garegga), but it’s not fun, and it does not line up with the “spirit” of shmupping.<br>Collision boxes have progressively gotten smaller over the years.<br>Bomb mechanics have become much more lenient<br><br>And yet, year upon year shmups become harder to master (barring scoring glitches) at the highest level of play (debatable I know).<br><br>Can FGs take lessons from the SHMUP and other genres? Of course, but <i>there is not a 1-1 mapping between these ideas and what goes on in FGs</i>. Even if we ignore the basic differences, FGs don’t have anything similar to the ranking system in shmups, among other things. The same can even be said about different styles on games in the FG genre itself, and that’s why people keep arguing about this every few months.<br><br>IMO, it would be better for people just to stick with one fighting game, and discuss how making certain things more accessible in that one title would improve it.<br>
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<div class=“QuoteAuthor”><a href="/profile/9887/d3v">d3v</a> said:</div>
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<div class=“QuoteAuthor”><a href="/profile/20554/NickRocks">NickRocks</a> said:</div>
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<div class=“QuoteAuthor”><a href="/profile/9887/d3v">d3v</a> said:</div>
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<div class=“QuoteAuthor”><a href="/profile/20554/NickRocks">NickRocks</a> said:</div>
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<div class=“QuoteAuthor”><a href="/profile/15874/Slamtastic">Slamtastic</a> said:</div>
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<div class=“QuoteAuthor”><a href="/profile/20554/NickRocks">NickRocks</a> said:</div>
<div class=“QuoteText”>If a fighting game doesn’t have a higher execution to practice, then…what the hell is there to do</div>
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React to and predict an actual human intellect.<br></div>
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that’s cute and all, but honestly the only people I ever see praising less complexity and execution and more “mindgames” are scrubs who like to memorize frame data but suck at actually playing the game.<div><br></div><div>You learn combos, then you learn how to use them in matches and the best times. That’s how it goes. If you remove the need to practice combos then the fun of fighting games is gone</div></div>
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If that were the case, then KI would be the greatest fighting game of all time.<div><br></div><div>Combos only support the neutral game. The best players of all time, are the ones who can win in the neutral game even before they hit a combo.</div></div>
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of course…but I like challenging combos and I dont think they should be removed </div>
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The problem is when they begin to dominate the meta-game. Sure you can say that they support the neutral game by providing a “threat” to not get hit, but at that point it starts to feel more like an artificial barrier to access the game at its most competitive.</div>
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but when a game has easy entry level controls and such (see: MvC2) and players elevate it to a higher level, it’s not the games fault
of course…but I like challenging combos and I dont think they should be removed </div>
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The problem is when they begin to dominate the meta-game. Sure you can say that they support the neutral game by providing a “threat” to not get hit, but at that point it starts to feel more like an artificial barrier to access the game at its most competitive.</div>
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but when a game has easy entry level controls and such (see: MvC2) and players elevate it to a higher level, it’s not the games fault</div>
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<font face=“Arial, Verdana” style=“font-family: Arial, Verdana; font-size: 10pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal;”><font size=“2”><span style=“line-height: normal;”>F/UC has fairly easy entry level controls, but some of the combos in that game are incredibly long and it isn’t rare for them to get up to 100%. It is the game’s fault that those combos are allowed to exist, and because of that, there’s a huge level of practice required to play the game competitively. That’s why many games have safety nets to make sure that landing a single hit isn’t determinative of an entire match through stuff like hit-stun deterioration, high damage scaling, gravity, IPS, or x times-per-combo rules (wallslam, groundbounce, OTGs). MvC2 escapes this problem because of the 50-hit infinite prevention thing and a high emphasis on resets instead of 20 second combos.</span></font></font><div style=“font-family: Arial, Verdana; font-size: 10pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal;”><br></div><div style=“font-family: Arial, Verdana; font-size: 10pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal;”><font size=“2”>Execution and practice should be rewarded up to a point (otherwise a game goes stale fast), but since fighting games at their nature are still interactive games, it’s important to either cap the rewards of execution so the game doesn’t become a rhythm game whenever someone gets hit, or said rhythm game ends in like 5 seconds so that players can get back to fighting each other.</font></div><div style=“font-family: Arial, Verdana; font-size: 10pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal;”><font size=“2”><br></font></div><div style=“font-family: Arial, Verdana; font-size: 10pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal;”><font size=“2”>Edit: Here’s a video showing what I mean by FUC’s problems with long combos:</font></div><div><font size=“2”><font face=“Arial, Verdana”><span style=“line-height: normal;”>http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=0GZoyqHwQM8#t=3770s</span></font></font></div><div><font size=“2”><font face=“Arial, Verdana”><span style=“line-height: normal;”><br></span></font></font></div><div><font size=“2”><font face=“Arial, Verdana”><span style=“line-height: normal;”>Edit edit: It’s at 1:02:50. The embedded video doesn’t skip to the proper time.</span></font></font></div>
<font face=“Arial, Verdana” size=“2”><span style=“line-height: normal;”>Not necessarily on regards to easy or not, but how do you all feel about…well honestly I can’t think of an example so I’ll just get straight to the shit:</span></font><div><font face=“Arial, Verdana” size=“2”><span style=“line-height: normal;”><br></span></font></div><div><font face=“Arial, Verdana” size=“2”><span style=“line-height: normal;”>In Guilty Gear, when you run and then stop, there is a noticeable recovery. During this recovery, you can cancel it into pretty much anything except blocking. This adds a layer of depth to the ground movement because you can’t do short dashes to try and bait out an attack or to slowly approach a zoner. It makes ground running only slightly safer than air dashing because you’re still vulnerable. And this isn’t exclusive to GG, many fighters (only going to narrow it to the ones where run is a movement option) have similar settings in place where, at the very least, on the startup of the run, you can’t block immediately, but in the middle of a run, you can. So short dashes can be punished. But, in GG, because you can cancel it into pretty much anything else, you can do faultless defense or slash back to immediately block, meaning your short dash is now safe. Now granted, this requires an added input, as well as meter. But the input is just back and two attack buttons, and moving forward gives you meter and you don’t have to hold it so you’ll pretty much always be able to do a short dash to FD and cancel FD to your normal guard. I haven’t played BB in awhile but you might be able to do the same thing with the short dash using barrier guard (however BB doesn’t have nearly as long of a stop recovery as GG does). </span></font></div><div><span style=“font-family: Arial, Verdana; font-size: small; line-height: normal;”><br></span></div><div><span style=“font-family: Arial, Verdana; font-size: small; line-height: normal;”>So what I’m getting at is, if you can cancel the recovery, is there a reason for it to be there to begin with anymore? I don’t know if the devs intended for it to be that way originally or if they just decided to leave it in, but that layer of depth (while not completely removed) is now reduced because there’s a universal simple way to get around it. And it’s not something like a complex input, it’s a very simple one. So what I want to ask is, with this in place, would the overall stop recovery mechanic still be worth having with the FD still there to cancel the recovery? It just means that you’ll have to do an extra input and doesn’t really add too much. I’m not saying it’s worthless, and if there’s far more to it, please educate me on it. But I’m interested in knowing peoples thoughts on this, and I felt it was relevant to this topic since taking out the stop recovery would make it easier, but with FD being able to cancel the recovery already, does it really lose anything? </span></div>
